Saturday, March 19, 2005

BOOK: Diana Mosley, "A Life of Contrasts"

The Mitford family is another thing of which I first read in David
Cannadine's Decline
and Fall of the British Aristocracy, who paints a fascinating picture
of the Mitfords as an example of the various ways in which the aristocracy
responded to the inexorable process of decline of their class (ch. 11, sec. iv).
Diana was perhaps one of the more notorious of the Mitford sisters.
She maried Oswald Mosley, the founder of British Fascism, and remained
for ever a supporter of his political opinions and efforts. Also notorious
was her friendship with Hitler and some other persons from his circle (e.g. Magda Goebbels).
Seeing her presentation of these opinions and acquaintanceships is surely
one of the main points of interest in this autobiography.

The other thing is
that she was a member of the upper classes, the sort of people who apparently
spend most of their time visiting each other, having dinners and saying clever
things. Thus she met a large number of well-known people, and an even larger
number of not-quite-so-well-known ones, and the book contains many anecdotes,
amusing bits of conversation, and so on; I rather enjoyed this, though I can imagine that some readers might eventually
get annoyed by the constant name-dropping, especially since many people are mentioned
without being properly introduced, as if it was simply obvious who they are.
There seems to be something slightly snobbish in this; merely being a titled aristocrat
and/or a minor literary personage does not in general suffice to make a person's
name really well-known to the public; I guess that even in 1977, when this autobiography was first published, many of
the names were obvious only to a relatively limited subset of readers, i.e. those
who were familiar with the kind of social circles that Diana usually moved in
(and perhaps the avid readers of tabloids :-)).
Naturally, I am not in the least familiar with them, nor would I particularly care
to be, so I often found myself wishing that some kind editor had produced footnotes
explaining who this or that person was. Fortunately one's ability to follow the narrative
is not really impaired by simply ignoring most of these names; I was vaguely
familiar with some of them from various books which I had read previously;
as for one or two that appear more often, I looked them up in Wikipedia.
(A rather more annoying characteristic of the book was her tendency to
occasionally include French sentences without translation; German ones, by
contrast, are always accompanied by a translation. Apparently she assumes that
everyone speaks French, or if he doesn't he must be an illiterate boor not
worth bothering about.)

It was in the passages dealing with Mosley, fascism, and Nazi Germany
that I most wished for some sort of editorial commentary; one imagines
that many details in these passages may be somewhat biased or slanted,
but it's hard to tell exactly which and how. This is where a good editor
could be really extremely helpful. For example, she says that Mosley's
New Party evolved into a fascist movement, complete with black shirts and
paramilitary formations, mainly to be able to defend themselves against
violent opponents who formerly often interrupted Mosley's public meetings
(ch. 10, p. 93). Perhaps it's quite true, perhaps not, but I really
have no way of knowing other than by reading more books on this subject,
which I'm not sure if I really want to do.

In 1933, Diana and her sister Unity attended the Parteitag in Nuremberg, a four-day
celebration organized by the Nazis soon after their seizure of power.
“The gigantic parades went without a hitch” (ch. 11, p. 103),
and yet in the next paragraph she complains that the English newspapers
portrayed the event as militaristic. How can gigantic parades not be militaristic?
People do not spontaneously form neat rows and march back and forth for no
obvious reason; they have to be herded and drilled and coerced to do it,
and the spirit that animates such an undertaking is the very essence of militarism:
regimenting people into rigid formations and ordering them about.

Chapters 12 and 15 contain several interesting observations about Hitler,
based on her conversations with him. Apparently he was quite a civil
and polite person in such situations, quite unlike the way in which
he was portrayed by many writings in the Allied countries not only during
but also after the war. Again some impartial editor's comments
would be welcome here, but I am inclined to believe her, for there is
after all no reason that a person should be unable to behave politely
in his personal life even though he is responsible for the murder of millions
of people. After all, Hitler wouldn't be the only such case; there
were plenty of “desk murderers”
in Nazi Germany, and no doubt a few specimens of this group could also be
found in many other totalitarian countries, or indeed in any large
buraucratic institution which, as a whole, performs acts of great evil.

Chapter 12 also contains several observations in which well-known
persons such as Churchill and Lloyd George express approval of at least
some aspects of Hitler and his policies (p. 118). On the one hand
there is of course nothing wrong with admitting that a regime such as
Hitler's may also have had its good sides, although at the same time one
surely has to agree that whatever these good sides were, they become
utterly insignificant when compared to its negative aspects; there does
therefore appear to be not much use in e.g. praising Hitler for the
economic recovery of Germany in the first years after his seizure of power,
if at the same time we are prepared to condemn him for having plunged
much of the world into war and ruin, into genocide and assorted wide-scale
slaughter. And besides, I vaguely recall having read or heard somewhere
that Germany's economic recovery in the first years of Hitler's regime
was not really sustainable, but had to result in war sooner or later,
or return into a state of depression. What is more, even if Hitler's
regime genuinely brought about a recovery of the German economy,
surely other countries eventually also recovered without having to
install such a horrible dictatorship. Anyway, this is another point where
an editor's comments would be useful.

At the end of the same chapter there are also some comparisons of the
sort that is very popular among all kinds of opponents of communism,
whether they hail from the far right (as in this case) or from a more
traditional free-market capitalist point of view: all these people
enjoy condemning communism by pointing out that the likes of Stalin
and Mao are responsible for more deaths than Hitler and other right-wing
dictatorships. This argument is sometimes used simply to condemn
communism, and sometimes to conflate left- and right-wing totalitarianism
as somehow equally bad and use this as an excuse to condemn them both
(often in favour of something which, on closer inspection, turns out
to be a free-market fundamentalism which is hardly much better than the
totalitarian systems previously condemned). I still doubt if,
proportionally to the size of the populations they dealt with
(China and the Soviet Union are after all much larger than Germany,
as well as much more populous), Mao and Stalin genuinely killed more
people than Hitler. But even if that were the case, it has to be said
that at least communism is based on a positive ideal, an ideal genuinely
worth striving towards: that of equality and a fair division of labour
as well as the fruits thereof, enabling everyone to live a life of
peace, happiness, and repose. In contrast to that, the main goals
of nazism have been from the outset negative: they relished Social Darwinism,
a ruthless struggle in all walks of life, the extermination or enslavement
and exploitation of other nations and territories, a hierarchical society
with dictatorship on all levels (the “Führer principle”);
theirs was a system which utterly disregarded the individuals and their
quality of life, treating them merely as so many cogwheels whose sole role
is to keep the mechanism that is the nation going. Nazism was unable to conceive of any
ideal or goal other than survival of the fittest, and the Nazi leaders
hoped that they and their nation would turn out to be the fittest.
What would such a system achieve? Russell's very reasonable criticism of
Plato's utopian Republic (another notoriously totalitarian state)
applies equally well here: “the answer is rather humdrum. It will
achieve success in wars against roughly equal populations, and it will
secure a livelihood for a certain small number of people. It will
almost certainly produce no art or science, because of its ridigity; in
this respect, as in others, it will be like Sparta. In spite of all the fine talk, skill in
war and enough to eat is all that will be achieved.” (History of
Western Philosophy, ch. xiv). Communism strived towards
ideals infinitely loftier and more desirable than that; and although
it is true that it has been sadly derailed, and that it descended into
misery and tyranny almost everywhere where it has been seriously tried,
yet we must admit that at least it strove towards the correct goals.
All that was missing was a way to prevent the power-hungry bureaucrats
and dictator wannabes from redirecting the communist efforts towards their
own selfish ends. Nevertheless genuine communism remains an ideal supremely
worth striving towards, and if we lose sight of it and become completely
immersed merely in the day-to-day efforts of survival, economic competition
and the pointless technological progress of today, humankind cannot achieve any
genuine progress towards a state of happiness and a life free of care, upheaval,
and exploitation. It is impossible to expect such progress from a system based,
such as e.g. the free-market capitalism of today, entirely on the vilest and
basest human instincts: greed, selfishness, and the desire to dominate over others.
(P.S. A nice essay on the communism-vs-fascism debate:
Sobotna
priloga, 12. feb. 2005, str. 8-9.)

At the end of ch. 13 (pp. 124-5) there are some interesting
comments about the Saarland plebiscite of 1935. A vast majority of the
population voted to unite with Germany, even though they knew that Hitler's
regime had been in power there for the last two years. Apparently much
of this support was genuine rather than a result of coercion or
manipulation, as has been claimed by some English newspapers at the time.
This may well be true; it is, after all, well known that, by and large,
Hitler had wide support among the German people all the time up to the
point when the war started to turn against them. Nevertheless I hope I'll
learn more about the Saarland plebiscite at some point; it would be
fascinating to see just how exactly did the people feel about Hitler's
regime at that time (apparently they must have seen it in a largely positive
light, otherwise they wouldn't have voted to join Germany). Still I can't
quite agree with the reasoning on p. 124, which seems to regard
the fact that the German people genuinely supported Hitler as some kind
of mitigating factor, as something which speaks in his favour.
Surely a person as fond of undemocratic systems as she was should have
realized that sometimes, frankly speaking, the people just don't know what's
in their best interest, and the fact that a people support their ruler
doesn't at all mean that the ruler isn't doing horrible things, or that
he shouldn't have been done away with at the earliest opportunity, or
that he isn't leading their country to ruin. No, the people's support for
the dictator doesn't exonerate him; it only means that the people must to
some extent share the guilt of his crimes.

The end of ch. 13 also contains some examples of the sort of
rather unsavoury reasoning that perhaps contributed the most to allowing
the horrors of regimes such as Hitler's to take place. “As to
the Jews [...] most Germans probably hoped they would remove themselves to some other part
of the globe. World Jewry with its immense wealth could find the money,
and England and France with the resources of their vast empires could find
the living space, it was imagined.” In the end, apparently,
it's all the Jews' fault anyway: their protests against the treatment of Jews
in Germany “hardened the hearts of the many Germans who were
well-disposed towards them. The anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany
in the thirties with the object of inducing the Jews of leaving the country.”
This is perhaps one of the most disagreeable passages of the entire book.
Here we have the belief that, if the majority population of some country
takes it into their heads to get rid of a certain minority, it's perfectly
acceptable to do so; it's quite OK to start persecuting this minority in the
hope that they will eventually get tired of the maltreatment and emigrate;
it's quite OK to expect other countries and the minority's compatriots to
accommodate the expelled population and bear the financial costs of the
whole operation. This bizarre disregard for the fact that nations are not
faceless monoliths, but consist of individual people with their individual
fates, lives, opinions, homes, and aspirations, is truly shocking.
Did it never occur to her that it is simply wrong to force someone to leave
his home and emigrate, even though he has done nothing wrong and his
family may have lived in the same spot for ages? And to start oppressing
and persecuting him if he refuses to leave? And to expect other countries
and other people, who have no personal connection with him, to make room
for him and cover the costs of his move, and to blame them for his demise
if they refuse to do it and our persecution of him ends in his death?
Elsewhere in the book she describes
how unhappy she and her husband were when they were imprisoned for some time
during the war, and later not allowed to live in London for some time,
even though they had committed no crimes; and yet here she proposes that
large numbers of people should be required not merely to move a few miles
away or avoid a certain part of the country for a while, but to emigrate
to a completely different part of the world, to countries with which they
have no connection, and leave behind everything to which they had hitherto
been accustomed, merely because the majority population of their country has
adopted an irrational desire for their removal. This lack of empathy is
truly astounding. It recurs in ch. 16, p. 143: plebiscites “were
probably the only way whereby war could have been avoided, and where ethnic
groups were mixed the losing group should have been offered rich inducements
to move into its own mother country. Those who refused would do so with
their eyes open.” This last sentence is particularly shocking. Once
again it seems OK to tell people to get the hell out or put up with
persecution. As for the “rich inducements”, surely there are
many examples in history showing that such promises generally come to nothing.
It must be said in her defense, however, that this concept of expulsion
and exchange of populations was still considered a reasonable thing in
the period not only between the wars but also immediately after the second
world war. Still, from a present-day point of view, surely one must agree
that the only acceptable approach is to let people live where they are and
in the way they want to, rather than force them to choose between emigration
and assimilation (or worse).

In ch. 15, pp. 135-6, there are some very disparaging comments
about Czechoslovakia; it was “an invention of the peace treaties
incorporating not only Czechs and Slovaks, who detested one another,
but also a large German-speaking minority, chunks of Hungary and an
area where the majority of the inhabitants were Poles. The fact that this
rickety country fell apart was no more surprising than that trouble came
in Northern Ireland from similar causes”. It's certainly
true that Czechoslovakia was only formed at the end of the first world war
and its borders were in many ways a result of wheeling and dealing
at the Versailles peace conference (where the Czechs and Slovaks were quite
good at lobbying, and were, unlike e.g. Hungary or Austria, treated by
the entente powers as allies rather than as defeated enemies); however,
many borders in central and eastern Europe were notoriously difficult to
determine, and it would be impossible to satisfy everyone. See e.g.
Margaret Macmillan's Peacemakers:
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War, which
cites many examples. The population of some area might consist of such a
mixture of two nations as couldn't be nicely separated by a border;
one nation may predominate in the cities and the other in the countryside,
for example; or giving some territory to the country whose nation predominates
in it might have deprived some other country of some vital traffic connection,
some strategically important area or some economic resources without which
it couldn't be viable. Giving the Sudetenland to Germany instead to
Czecholovakia would make the latter impossible to defend (as of course
both sides well knew). Philip St. C. Walton-Kerr's 1939 book
Gestapo
shows the efforts of the German secret agents to stir up discontent
among the German minority in the Sudetenland. They also encouraged
the aspirations of the Slovaks; although these had pressed for more
autonomy before, it was only after the weakening of the Prague government
at Munich that the disintegration of Czechoslovakia seemed possible.
Even so, their declaration of independence and subsequent request for
German military “protection” were directly a result of German
instructions and pressure (Ian Kershaw,
Hitler 1936-1945 Nemesis,
ch. 4, sec. iii). In short, were it not for the meddling of its
neighbours, chiefly Germany, this “rickety country” might have
kept going for many more years.

In ch. 16, p. 144 Poland receives a scarcely better
treatment. She mentions Lloyd George's disapproval of the
Versailles “arrangement which divided Germany and put
millions of Germans into Polish frontiers”. But what
else could be done? There were also many Poles within German
frontiers, which doesn't seem to bother her. The areas
given to Poland were predominantly Polish; and without dividing
Germany, Poland could not have had access to the sea, which
would have made it economically unviable (or completely dependent
upon Germany).

In the years before the war, Oswald Mosley (as well as Diana) supported
the notion that Britain should arm but try to stay out of any wars unless
its empire was directly threatened (ch. 15, p. 136;
ch. 16, pp. 144, 147). “Win or lose it [war] was bound to
diminish not only England and France and Germany, but Europe itself.” (P. 144.)
This is in a way true; had Britain and France not been exhausted by
the war, their colonial empires might have kept on going for longer than
they had. But in the long term the colonies would have gained independence
anyway (once the colonized nations awake and start clamouring for independence,
there would be no way for a Britain or a France to hold them back, except
perhaps by instituting a regime of brutal tyranny not much better than the
one introduced by the Nazis in their occupied territories in eastern Europe);
and besides, how can we defend imperialism and the exploitation
of colonies merely for the sake of Europe and its countries being more powerful
than otherwise? Besides, it's doubtful if avoiding war would have helped anyway.
If two countries are equally well developed but one is larger and more
populous, it will be stronger both economically and militarily, perhaps
culturally as well, and it will have a better position to develop more
quickly in the future. Thus it happened in the late 19th century that
German economy overtook Britain's in many ways, and there wasn't a whole lot
that Britain could do about it, since it simply had much fewer people than
Germany at the time. Likewise in the mid-20th century, even if the
European countries had avoided war, they would likely still be eclipsed by
the power of the United States and the Soviet Union. The largely undeveloped
colonies wouldn't have been of any use to them in this struggle either.

And besides, I cannot quite understand the reasoning behind this
policy of Mosley's to advocate avoiding war until Britain is directly
threatened. If Britain and France didn't get involved in the war,
it would be over in a few weeks, Hitler would take his half of Poland
and spend the next year or so consolidating his position; by then
all of central and eastern Europe would consist of territories either
under his direct control, or under that of his satellites. Of course
Germany's appetites would not be satisfied by this; he might turn to
some of the smaller countries in western or nothern Europe then, or
perhaps attack France (should Britain still stand aside?); or perhaps
he would feel strong enough to attack the Soviet Union, and he might
just have succeeded (we see how close he came even though part of his
forces were busy elsewhere and the Soviet Union had some help from its
allies). Germany would then annex large parts of the Soviet Union, perhaps
as far as the Urals, and would finally be in a position to become a
world-class superpower (cf. Michael Burleigh, The
Third Reich: A New History, ch. 7, “Other People's Wars”).
By then, Britain and France would be quite
insignificant compared to Germany, and their opinions would be irrelevant.
Sure, Hitler had promised to respect the integrity of the British Empire;
but if he now decided to break his promise, as he had broken so many others
before, Britain would be in no position to object. No, 1939 was in fact
high time to start a major war against Hitler; if it had been started a
couple of years earlier things would have been much easier, and if it
had been started later (or not at all) things could have turned truly disastrous.

Chapter 17 is interesting and deals with her and Mosley's experiences in prison, where
they were kept for several years during the war under a wartime regulation
which allowed people to be imprisoned indefinitely without trial
if they were suspected of being potentially disloyal. Apparently the
British authorities were convinced that Mosley and his supporters could
work for German interests or form a kind of fifth column, although
Mosley explicitly called on his supporters to fight against Germany in
the case of an invasion (ch. 16, p. 152; ch. 31, pp. 256-6). I personally
think that important civil liberties such as the right to a fair trial
and the right to criticize one's government should not be suspended
during wartime; in fact they should be defended particularly carefully
during wartime, for wars are always a period when militaristic thinking
and its accompanying tendency towards oppression and tyranny grow in influence.
Besides, if things were as described in this book, it seems that the
British government really did not have a good enough reason to imprison
Mosley (let alone his wife!) as a potentially disloyal subject, let
alone keep him imprisoned for such a long period (several years). I guess
that at some point it would be good to try to find some book about Mosley
and his fascist party from some more impartial source.

She seems to be mildly critical of the Nuremberg trials, and suggests
that “the Allies should [...] have thrown in a few war-crimes
of their own, in order to make the whole thing seem more like even-handed
justice and less an isolated act of vengeance” (ch. 18, p. 186).
I think this is a very reasonable idea; the way that war crimes are
defined nowadays, it's practically impossible to conduct a war without
committing at least a few war crimes. Even if (as nobody doubts) the
Allies had commited very few compared to what had been done by Germany,
they could not be completely disregarded by a truly impartial war trimes
court. I must admit that I personally am somewhat uncomfortable with
the whole concept of war crimes; above all, since there is no higher
power to enforce a prohibition of war crimes evenly, such a prohibition
would inevitably be ignored by the stronger countries and only used
by them as a tool with which to twist the hands of weaker ones.
One that I find especially absurd is the notion of “a crime against peace”,
whereby merely starting a war is by itself already considered a war crime.
Surely, if a nation has decided that the continuation of peace under
the present conditions looks less enticing than the prospect of war (perhaps
a short one, to be followed perhaps by marked improvements in their situation),
it will go to war. To consider this a crime is to suggest that any peace,
no matter how unacceptable to one of the parties involved, is better than any war;
a claim which, to me at least, seems highly problematic.

In ch. 19, p. 187 there is an interesting anecdote about how
the young Goethe was on friendly terms with the French officers who had occupied
his home city of Frankfurt during the Seven Years' War, and how this didn't seem
to outrage anyone much at the time, whereas nowadays analogous behaviour
would probably have been branded as vile collaboration. I often feel that
warfare of the 18th and early 19th century seems somehow remarkably civilized
and orderly to us nowadays; the soldiers meet on the battlefield, nearly arrayed
in long lines, shoot at each other for a few hours, then call a truce and
march out to collect their dead, and so on. The civilian population often
seems to have been not much affected. I wonder how much truth there is
in this view; probably not very much, wars have always been exceedingly
nasty affairs, although it is possible that the rise of nationalism in
the 19th century and the concept of total war in the 20th (not to mention
the technological progress) have made wars even more horrible than they used to be.

From various passages in the later chapters, it seems that several
post-war British governments made efforts to prevent Mosley from appearing
on television or trying to continue his political career, and even from leaving
the country (by refusing to issue passports to him and Diana);
pp. 187, 193, 200-1. If this
is true, it seems an exceedingly silly course of action. Surely he
had so few supporters by this time that there would be no harm in letting him be.
At the same time it often seems that Diana's complaints about the government
are just an expression of patrician arrogance against those who are primarily
interested in the common people; she refers to “the myriad trivial annoyances
inseparable from life in England under a Labour governmen” (ch. 20, p. 200;
and see also ch. 23, p. 215).

After the war, Mosley starting advocating the idea of a united Europe
(ch. 20, p. 201). However, for a while, Britain still hoped to
remain a great power in its own right, and Mosley's ideas were therefore
unpopular (ch. 23, p. 218). He also opposed immigration into
Britain, particularly of coloured people (ch. 24, pp. 228-230); he was much
criticized for this, although he “had always insisted that the
immigrants must be decently treated once they are in the country”.
I guess the reason is that if one publicly advocates that no more immigrants
should come, but the ones already here should be treated decently, this
is a distinction much too subtle to be understood by the white working-class
louts that are the most likely supporters of such a politician. They
will see in his message simply a confirmation that the coloured
immigrants are undesirable scum, and an encouragement to not only oppose
further immigration but also to persecute the immigrants already in the country.

And this passage from p. 230 shows again the same pernicious line of
thinking that we saw previously applied to the Jews: “If this problem
is ever to be solved it will have to be in a European context, because if their
countries of origin are to be induced to receive the immigrants back the
inducement will have to be the only one that counts: economic and financial”.
Hasn't she learned anything from the second world war?
Here we have again this horrible notion that people should be encouraged
or induced to move from one country to another, and that distant other
countries should be willing to accept them merely because this happens to suit
the prejudice of a part of the people of the country in which these
immigrants presently live. Naturally enough, if a person emigrated from
some poor third-world country and, after much hard work and effort, managed
to start his life anew in Britain, he or she will not be interested to move
back to his poor native land; he might be induced, if his native country were
instantly made as prosperous as Britain (instantly, and not in twenty years' time,
when our immigrant will have children who will have no other homeland than
Britain), which is impossible. No positive inducement which Britain could
realistically be expected to offer could persuade such immigrants to return.
Any inducement would therefore have to adopt the form of threats, of persecution,
and of economic hand-twisting of the countries which would be expected
to receive the returning immigrants. All of this is quite unacceptable
and it's somewhat sad that the Mosleys didn't realize this.
And besides, their dire warnings about coloured immigration and its
consequences for race relations don't seem to have come true; the different
races seem to be getting along remarkably well in present-day Britain, perhaps
better than in many other countries.

Ch. 26 is a nice comparison of Churchill and Hitler, who apparently
“had more in common with one another than perhaps either would
have been prepared to admit” (p. 236).

There are some candid admissions of the fact that
babies, particularly
new-born ones, are ugly (ch. 2, p. 19). I'm terribly glad to finally
see somebody who agrees with me in this aspect, and who, unlike me,
has the courage to express this opinion in public. Apparently Lytton Strachey
had a similar aversion to babies; ch. 8, p. 83.

On the dislike of schools and their “zoo-like smell”; ch. 4, p. 42.

When she got married for the first time (to Bryan Guinness), her mother-in-law
was fascinated by Diana's cooking skills, namely her ability to fry eggs:
“I've never heard of such a thing, it's too clever!&rduo;
(Ch. 7, p. 65.) As they say: you can't make this shit up. If there
exists a hall of fame for the best instances of aristocrats turning into their
own caricatures, this one should be right at the top next to Marie Antoinette's
advice to eat cake if you can't afford bread.

An example of “the grand luxe” from the belle époque:
“A carpet of fresh blossoms on her bathroom floor, renewed twice
a day” (“her” being Ida Rubinstein, a famous dancer; ch. 10, p. 100).

Apparently the movies of the 1930s were characterized by a “sugary and
embarrassing sentimentality”, which she (and many of her friends)
hated just as much as the violence of the movies of the 1970s; ch. 12,
p. 112.

Another unpopular opinion in which I agree with her is the
understanding of suicide. “To that small extent man must be the
master of his fate. He did not ask to be born; if his life becomes
too tragic or unbearable he has the right to die.”
(Ch. 16, p. 151.)

There are many nice rants against “development” which ruins
formerly beautiful places and spoils their pristine beauty; piles of concrete
that pass for tourist infrastructure on the beaches, huge skyscrapers ruin
the skyline of a nice old city such as Paris, industry and pollution threaten
Venice, etc.; pp. 72, 90, 213, 249-250. “Commercialism and
crowds are more destructive than bombs”, p. 250.
I quite agree with that. The only redeeming characteristic of
technological progress is that it makes us more comfortable;
otherwise it just makes our world uglier and uglier.

There are also some instances of rather sillier conservatism:
“Twenty years ago the posts within Europe were dependable” (ch. 23,
p. 220) — isn't this the typical old person's complaint of
how everything is going to the dogs?

All in all, although this book contains several passages that one cannot
help disagreeing with (as has been discussed above), it was a very pleasant
read and a great wellspring of amusing anecdotes and reminiscences.
On the other hand, from a purely biographical point of view, it has to be admitted
that it may be better to refer to some other book if one is interested primarily
in a more detailed and probably also more even-handed biographical treatment
of Diana Mosley's life; but this is hardly unreasonable, as this book is after
all an autobiography. Some time ago, I read Anne de Courcy's biography of
Diana (Diana Mosley, 2003),
which contains more biographical detail, and
The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell,
which is a sort of joint biography of the whole Mitford family. They were both
quite pleasant to read; however, little by little I am beginning to notice more and
more overlap between all these Mitford-related books, which is of course natural since
they speak about the same subject, the lives of the same people; but slowly
I think I am getting saturated with the subject, and I'm not sure if I will be reading
any more Mitford-related books in the near future. Incidentally, many of Nancy
Mitford's novels also contain thinly veiled anecdotes from the life of her sisters
and herself; they generally make for delightfully hilarious reading.